Flipper Zero: renaming our cyber dolphin

As you may have noticed from the number of photos we've all uploaded to Twitter and other social networks, the first "European" Flipper Zeros have finally started to arrive in our hands! One of the first steps that some of us have missed has been to be able to name our pet as we wish: here I tell you how to do it!

Flipper Zero's names

Yes, it was one of the first things I tried to do! Not that I disliked the name too much, it was called Omurow when it came to me (thanks Alex, Blanca and Damián!) and I turned it on, but I went through all the menus and options trying to modify it and I couldn't find the option!

Researching about it on the internet I found out that each Flipper comes from the factory with a unique name engraved in the OTP memory. Also according to the creators and as a curiosity, the names are randomly generated by a neural network trained with Pokemon names!

This leaves us only one option if we want to rename our flippers: we must download the source code of the firmware, modify the line where the name is declared, recompile the whole firmware and save it again in our device... maybe this way may throw you back, but I assure you that it is much easier than it seems!

Downloading and modifying the firmware

By now and if you have reached this publication, I understand that you already know where to download and get all the firmware in its entirety, we have it at https://github.com/flipperdevices/flipperzero-firmware

We clone the repository in the way we prefer, in my case from Mac we will do it by using git clone --recursive https://github.com/flipperdevices/flipperzero-firmware.git

Once everything has been downloaded, locate the file furi_hal_version.c and look for the string *furi_hal_version.name == 0x00 ? NULL :furi_hal_version.name;  which, at the time of writing, is on line 278.

We must replace the whole string with the name we want in inverted commas, in my case the new name will be Pascasi0!!

Compiling!

Once the changes from the previous step have been saved, it's time to compile everything again in order to obtain the dfu file that we can then burn to the device using qFlipper. The instructions to compile it are detailed in the project's own GitHub and the options to do so are from Docker, or from Linux and MacOS (Caution! Pay attention to the pre-requisites!).

Once the compilation is finished, the necessary binaries will have been generated and can be found inside the folder /dist 

The only thing left to do now is to save our new firmware from qFlipper, to do so, we must select the option "Install From File" lwhich will open a file explorer and we must select the .dfu file that has been generated in the previous step and, finally, confirm its installation.

Et voilá!! Pascasi0 is ready and waiting for the action!

As you can see it sounded more complicated than it really is! I hope it will be helpful if you feel the need to rename your Flippers.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH as always for your visit and for your time in reading the article!